Abstract
In his remarks on L’Homme, La Forge aims at a rigid separation of the functions of the body from the activity of the soul. This project looks authentically Cartesian, but some critical issues reveal how difficult it is taking away any activity of the soul in sensitive experience. In the Traité de l’esprit de l’homme, La Forge explicitly limits the cognitive capability of the memory without the active presence of the mind.
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Notes
- 1.
La Forge (1999), 59.
- 2.
Descartes, AT XI, 179; (2004), 151–52.
- 3.
Material memory had already been assimilated to imagination in the Regulae. AT X, 416, CMS I, 42.
- 4.
- 5.
Descartes to Meyssonnier, January 29, 1640, AT III, 18–21; p. 20, CSMK, 144: “I think also that some of the impressions which serve the memory can be in various other parts of the body: for instance, the skill of a lute player is not only in his head, but also partly in the muscles of his hands, and so on.”
- 6.
Descartes to Mersenne, April 1, 1640, AT III, 47-8, CSMK, 145–6.
- 7.
Descartes to Meyssonnier, January 29, 1640, AT III, 20, CSMK, 144.
- 8.
Aristotle had already argued that intellectual smartness and memory were inversely proportional. Cf. Of Memory and Reminiscence, 1, 449b: “indeed, as a rule, slow people have a good memory, whereas those who are quick-witted and clever are better at recollecting.”
- 9.
AT XI, p. 177, (2004), 150. Repeated in the Dioptrique, AT VI, 129. As it is well known, the topic will be resumed by Malebranche, Recherche de la Vérité,II,I,VII, OC, I, 232 ss.
- 10.
Descartes to Mersenne, April 1, 1640, AT III, 48, CSMK, 146
- 11.
Descartes to Mersenne, June 11, 1640, AT III, 84–5, CSMK, 148.
- 12.
On the view of intellectual memory in the Conimbricenses commentary to De memoria et reminiscentia, see Gilson (1979), s.v. Mémoire. The passage quoted by Gilson clearly shows that most of Descartes’ remarks about memory before 1640 derive from this tradition. The Conimbricenses ascribe to intellectual memory the remembrance of universal and immaterial things and deny any difference between intellectual memory and intellect. Descartes repeats a traditional claim even in placing material memory in the back of the brain. Ivi, 78. Conversing with Burman, Descartes says that the remembrance of universals pertains to intellectual memory, AT V, 150: “Verum haec memoria intellectualis magis est universalium quam singularium…”
It is important to stress, besides this, that the Conimbricenses add the notion of intellectual memory to the Aristotelian text. The intellectual memory they speak of, as a matter of fact, does not correspond to the Aristotelian theory of reminiscence, which was not, in any way, devoted to preserving the memory of immaterial and universal concepts.
- 13.
Descartes to Mersenne, August 6, 1640, AT III, 143, CSMK, 151. Emphasis mine.
- 14.
On the Regulae see Angelini (2000). The existence of an intellectual memory does not tell yet us whether this notion points to a specifically Cartesian theory, as Joyce (1997) seems to think, or whether it overlaps that proper to scholastic commentaries to the De memoria et reminiscentia. On the presence and the sense of this notion in Aquinas see Bazán (1990). The hint in the Studium bonae mentis that Baillet cites seems dependent on the theory of an intellectual memory extractable from the Conimbricenses commentary to De memoria et reminiscentia, which identifies intellectual memory and intellect. Cf. Baillet (1987), II, 66: “It seemed to doubt that memory were distinct from intellect and imagination. It did not think that memory could extend or grow, but rather be more or less filled.” AT X, 200–01 and Descartes (2013), 134–5.
- 15.
Once and only once, in a letter to Mersenne, on August 6, 1640, Descartes will call it “spiritual”. AT III, 143.
- 16.
- 17.
Objectiones Quintae, AT VII, 264.
- 18.
Quintae Responsiones, AT VII, 356–7, CSMK, II, 247.
- 19.
Landucci convincingly argue for identifying the Hypersapistes with Mersenne. Cf. Landucci (2001).
- 20.
Descartes to X*** [Endegeest, August 1641], AT III, 423–24, CSMK, 189–90.
- 21.
AT III, 425, CSMK, 190.
- 22.
Arnauld to Descartes, June 3, 1648, AT V, 186.
- 23.
Ivi, 187.
- 24.
Descartes to (Arnauld), June 4, 1648, AT V, 192, CSMK, 354.
- 25.
AT V, 192–93, CSMK, 354–55, emphasis mine. This aspect of the Cartesian theory is well explicated by Elisa Angelini (2000), 197 and 206. See also Minerbi Belgrado (2006), 850.
Understanding intellectual memory as acknowledgement quietly echoes Fernel’s account of the recollection of universals known in the past: “When (concepts of kinds) come to the mind, if we are considering the past, the mind anyway recognizes to have already entertained and known them and this certainly is intelligence memory (intelligentiae memoria).” Fernel (2003) VI, 14, 500, on which see Céard (2002), 129.
- 26.
Arnauld to Descartes, July 1648, AT V, 213. Emphasis mine. Arnauld quotes the Quintae responsiones from Soly 1641 edition.
- 27.
Descartes to Arnauld, July 29, 1648, AT V, 220, CSMK, 356–7: “it is not sufficient for memory that there should be traces left in the brain by preceding thoughts. The traces have to be of such a kind that the mind recognizes that they have not always been present in us, but were at some time newly impressed. Now for the mind to recognize this, I think that when these traces were first made it must have made use of pure intellect to notice that the thing which was then presented to it was new and had not been presented before; for there cannot be any corporeal trace of this novelty. Consequently, if ever I wrote that the thoughts of children leave no traces in their brain, I meant traces sufficient for memory, that is, traces which at the time of their impression are observed by pure intellect to be new. In a similar way we say that there are no human tracks in the sand if we cannot find any impressions shaped like a human foot, though perhaps there may be many unevennesses made by human feet, which can therefore in another sense be called human tracks.” (Emphasis mine)
Clarke (2003), 203, misses this true reverse of the argument. Clarke himself, coherent with his own empiricist reading of Descartes, deems intellectual memory a theological relic with no role in Descartes’ cognitive system. Ivi, 99–105, but see the relevant remarks by Des Chene (2006).
- 28.
To Mersenne November, or December 1632, AT I, 263, CSMK, 40: “I am now dissecting the heads of various animals, so that I can explain what imagination, memory, etc. consist in.”
- 29.
Descartes to Huygens, October 10, 1642, AT III, 578, CSMK, 216.
- 30.
La Forge (1999), 332.
- 31.
Cf. also La Forge (1999), 332.
- 32.
La Forge (1997), 178.
- 33.
Ivi, 181: “…after the memory traces have thus retraced the original species on the gland, when the spirits pass again in the same way through the same pores they flow into the same muscles and thus dispose our body to begin the same actions which it performed on the occasion of the object which stimulated it the first time. That never fails to happen in animals, and even in human beings when the power of their soul does not inhibit it.” Following Descartes, L’Homme, AT XI, 185. Cf. also La Forge (1999), 364.
- 34.
La Forge (1999), 283–4. Cf. also La Forge (1999), 385-6. Cf. Bordoli (1994), 71–79.
- 35.
La Forge (1997), 178. Emphasis mine.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Ivi, 182. Emphasis mine.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
Cf. Gassendi (1642), Epistola IV, 194. The consonance between the comparisons of memory and a sheet of paper first made by Gassendi in the fourth Letter on De apparente magnitudine solis and later by Descartes in the letter to Meyssonnier, January 29, 1640, is striking. AT III, 20, CSMK, 144. Descartes re-proposes the comparison in the letter to Mesland, May 2, 1644. AT IV, 114–15, CSMK, 233: “It is rather as the folds in a piece of paper or cloth make it easier to fold again in that way than it would be if it had never been so folded before.”
I am grateful for Theo Verbeek and Jan-Erick Boss’ kindness and competence in pointing to Gassendi as the author hinted at by Chanet in this text.
- 41.
Chanet (1649), 150. To Chanet the en passant hint made by Descartes in the fourth Discours of the Dioptrique was enough, AT VI, 112. In relation to this, La Forge maliciously remarks that Chanet had carefully read Descartes because he repeats his thesis without quoting him, as if those theses were his own. Cf. La Forge (1974), 169.
- 42.
Ivi, 191.
- 43.
Ivi, 195.
- 44.
Fracastoro (2006), 76: “Quae ergo promptissima sunt, et statim sese offerunt, ut aliàs collata cum illo quod occasionem praebet, memoriam facere dicuntur; quae vero indigent perscrutatione et discursu quodam, reminiscentiam.”
- 45.
Ibid.: “We then call reminiscence the act which let us know again, via an inquiry, what we once already knew, but which has failed memory.” (“Reminisci enim dicimur id, quod de novo per inquisitionem addiscimus, aliàs quidem notum, sed iam è memoria delapsum.”)
- 46.
Chanet (1649), 239, 246.
- 47.
Ivi, 195.
- 48.
Ivi, 247 ff.
- 49.
Ivi, 194.
- 50.
La Forge (1997), 183.
- 51.
Ibid.
- 52.
Ivi, 184.
- 53.
Infra, fn 12.
- 54.
Descartes, Passions of the Soul, § XLII; La Forge, (1999), 322.
- 55.
La Forge (1997), 183–4.
- 56.
Ivi, 185.
- 57.
Ivi, 186.
- 58.
Infra, fn 29.
- 59.
La Forge (1997), p. 187. On the tensions internal to La Forge’s theory of memory see Favaretti Camposampiero’s analysis (2009), 390–94.
- 60.
Descartes à Elisabeth, Egmond, October 6, 1645, AT IV, 310.
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Scribano, E. (2016). La Forge on Memory: From the Treatise on Man to the Treatise on the Human Mind . In: Antoine-Mahut, D., Gaukroger, S. (eds) Descartes’ Treatise on Man and its Reception. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46989-8_9
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